Jasmine Lee-Jones on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun

Jasmine Lee-Jones (winner of a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama) joins Windham-Campbell Prize administrator Michael Kelleher for a wide-ranging conversation about the incredible power of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, linking the work of Hansberry and Jordan Peele, and the power of dreams.

*
Reading list: 

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry • August Wilson’s Century Cycle • Get Out by Jordan Peele • Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson • “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane • Beneatha’s Place by Kwame Kwei-Armah

*
From the episode:

Jasmine Lee-Jones: In truth, when I was rereading it, I was like, she’s an overwriter like me, and I don’t think there’s anything–like, I’m trying to cut down, I’m writing a film now and it’s 170 pages. Magnolia is about that length, but you can’t really send in a film script that’s 170 pages.

I know where it comes from in me and it comes from the same place in her, I think, I’m presuming: this desire for everything to have a purpose, which I think is such a grand desire, such a beautiful desire and the desire of a dreamer as well, that everything has meaning. But the stage direction I was talking about is: “she will be known among her people as a settled woman,” which makes me think, who is she describing this for?

“She will be known”–because if she was writing this to give to her people, she wouldn’t have to say, she will be known among her people, but she’s writing with an awareness and it’s that whole question that I confront and every black artist in the theater confronts (and if they tell you they haven’t, they’re lying): Is this for white people?

And it’s a hard place to be in because you don’t wanna feel like a sellout. You don’t want to feel like you are putting other people before your people. You have to have an awareness, which I think she did, to kind of get the stories about black people and for black people even in motion within the current structure that we have, which I’m sure she had plans and was fighting so hard to change.

Rereading it, the spirit of it is so not “I want to prove our humanity to white people.” I think it is for black people, the play. It is deeply rooted in reclamation of our right to dream, what happens to a dream deferred. You know, I love that poem. And took me years to understand. I understood as a child, but not to the extent I understand it now. And that last line, which is another horror: or does it explode?

I think the job of the artist is, remember, remember, remember, this is not normal. We don’t have to live like this. Which I think is what she’s doing in this play.